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But you've lost some compositional "pull" by having the easel upright.

Might be a better arrangement if you angled the easel on the same plane as the painting , moved the candle more central and dropped the usual distracting elements like that rag on the left and the glasses with that sharp highlight running through.

The observations (not concerns) about your overly-technical approach reside with some of your still life images where you invariably over complicate the weighting of the components. Their relationship to the whole.

Anyway mate ,

This image achieves what I imagine you set out to do, ambience, story and mood. The lighting dilemma isn't an issue to appreciate. Film noir etc , good theatrical.

You have a greyscale issue processing the composite parts separately.

One set is grainy , the other smooth and it doesn't gel.

So, add the elements , and then apply the conversion to the whole.

You could consolidate the whole thing using any tech thereafter , duplex,duotone etc.

Just a suggestion Nick , and I aint posting jack ***** till the click club finds a desert island to breed with each other and hopefully spawn some good photography.

Think as you wander about how a b.g image might suit other images where you have sharp subject matter.

This image has a rubbish background , but the train is nice , shoot some old railway sidings and combine the two . As you can replace skies , Im sure you can replace backgrounds.

Cant be arsed going into consistent aps and light source , but whacked a 20min mod to give you an idea. Didnt drop the brush opacity below 60% and would have used the pen tool if extracting for detail.

Its got superb mood and surrealism, but the sum of the parts don't really gel the whole.

The eye isnt allowed to settle on a focal point , chairs seem confused between balanced and interlocking (drop the middle one , it has no shadow from the soucelight behind) and the sky looks rather to obviously mirrored/flipped. Maybe patch and lose the symmetry.

Unless your fussed about converging verticals with wide angle shots (which im not) , you could try to select the offending leans with the marquee tool and slap an "edit-distort-perspective" to that element only.

Do it on a separate layer so you can mask back those parts that were ok to begin with without affecting the entire image.

Selective straightening / rotation / skew , will work far better applied locally rather than the usual mistake of trying to adjust the perspective of the whole image in one go.

Slapped a quick mod.

And next time you post something up if you find the advice useful , whack the "Nominate as constructive critique" button under the comment , cos my finger went numb typing .